Research
- My main research interests lie in grammatical inference, with a book published in March 2010 (Book).
- I also am interested in using plane graphs to represent data (typically images) and then being able so
solve isomorphism problems (also for the case of subgraph isomorphism) which in turn allows us to analyse and compare easier.
- Another question I have looked into is active learning, with a competition that ran last year (Zulu),
in learning models and in swarm robotics.
Publications
I have tried to organise these here
Some events I am involved with in 2011:
- I am president of SPECIF. SPECIF is the French Society
for Education and Research in Computer Science. SPECIF promotes Education in informatics in Universities,
Research in informatics in the academic world, and the specificities of academic jobs in informatics.
- In February 2011 was held in Accra Ghana's first capacity transfer bootcamp in the areas of Machine Learning and
ACTIVE (Advanced Technologies for Knowledge-Intensive Enterprises). I was one of the organisers of this
exciting event
-
Jeffrey Heinz, Menno van Zaanen and I will be presenting a tutorial
at the next ACL conference, held in Portland in June. The title is Formal and Empirical Grammatical Inference.
Some events I have been involved with for the last few months:
- I organised the Zulu competition.
If you are interested in learning DFA with membership queries you should check the web site.
- Gemma Garriga and I acted as workshop and tutorial chairs for
ECML-PKDD 2010.
- ICGI 2010, the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference took place
in Valencia, September 2010. I gave there a tutorial on active learning.
Some links
- The
Grammatical Inference Homepage, looked after by Menno van Zaannen, but it needs updating.
- On this webpage
(in French) one can find different sets of slides concerning research methodology.
- I am member of the Network of Excellence PASCAL 2,
where I am in charge of the Curriculum Development Programme. This means that anyone interested in proposing an activity related with
teaching and machine learning should consider contacting me.
- I am member of the CNU 27, the National Council of Universities (for France) which
is the national authority in charge of recruiting academics and following up their careers.
- Here are some nice webpages done by some students to help teach graph theory (in
French).
- Frédéric Tantini built this webpage with
data from bird songs.
- Laurent Meiller implemented a learning algorithm I designed
with Paul
Goldberg. It is here
(in French). The idea is to find a recurring pattern in a string which not only appears often but that also
can appear as close (for the edit distance) variants.
- The ERS website for evaluation of research journals.
This project concerns evaluating the reputation of the main scientific journals in computer science.
It corresponds to joint work with several colleagues, and specially
with Emilie Samuel. Some papers can be found here.
- The ANR project SATTIC is run between the laboratoire LIRIS in Lyon and the Laboratoire Hubert Curien in Saint-Etienne and here is its
webpage. We are trying, in this project, to extract plane graphs from images.
The advantage of using plane graphs is that a number of algorithmic problems become tractable.
How to join me
Colin de la Higuera 
Laboratoire LINA UMR CNRS 6241
UFR de Sciences et Techniques
2 rue de la Houssinière
BP 92208
44322 Nantes Cedex 03
France
(33) (0)2 51 12 58 33
(33) (0)2 51 12 58 97
Instructions to get to the lab by foot, car, plane or train are here
send me a mail to cdlh@univ-nantes.fr
Others
This page is
always, albeit unreliably, under construction.
Last Updated:
(*) hexa, of course.
